Monday 30
November 2015 08.00 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 1 December 2015

Tony
Blair went to war in Iraq despite a report by South African experts
with unique knowledge of the country that showed it did not possess weapons of
mass destruction, according to a book published on Sunday.

God,
Spies and Lies, by South African journalist John Matisonn, describes how then president Thabo
Mbeki tried in vain to convince both Blair and President George W Bush that
toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would be a terrible
mistake.

Mbeki’s
predecessor, Nelson Mandela, also tried to convince the American leader, but
was left fuming that “President Bush doesn’t know how to think”.

The claim
was this week supported by Mbeki’s office, which confirmed that he pleaded with
both leaders to heed the WMD experts and even offered to become their
intermediary with Saddam in a bid to maintain peace.

South
Africa had a special insight into Iraq’s potential for WMD because the
apartheid government’s own biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programme
in the 1980s led the countries to collaborate. The programme was abandoned
after the end of white minority rule in 1994 but the expert team, known as Project Coast, was put back together by Mbeki to
investigate the US and UK assertion that Saddam had WMD – the central premise
for mounting an invasion.

Mbeki,
who enjoyed positive relations with both Blair and Saddam, asked for the team
to be granted access.

“Saddam
agreed, and gave the South African team the freedom to roam unfettered
throughout Iraq,” writes Matisonn, who says he drew on
sources in Whitehall and the South African cabinet. “They had access to UN
intelligence on possible WMD sites. The US, UK and UN were kept informed of the
mission and its progress.”

The
experts put their prior knowledge of the facilities to good use, Matisonn
writes. “They already knew the terrain, because they had travelled there as
welcome guests of Saddam when both countries were building WMD.”

On their
return, they reported that there were no WMDs in Iraq. “They knew where the
sites in Iraq had been, and what they needed to look like. But there were now
none in Iraq.”

In
January 2003, Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as president, sent a team to
Washington to explain the findings, but with little success. Mbeki himself then
met Blair for three hours at Chequers on 1 February, the book relates.

He warned
that the wholesale removal of Saddam’s Ba’ath party could lead to a national
resistance to the occupying coalition forces. But with huge military
deployments already under way, Blair’s mind was clearly made up. When Frank Chikane, director-general in the president’s office,
realised that the South Africans would be ignored, it was “one of the greatest
shocks of my life”, he later wrote in a memoir.

Matisonn
adds: “Mandela, now retired, had tried as well. On Iraq, if not other issues, Mandela
and Mbeki were on the same page. Mandela phoned the White House and asked for
Bush. Bush fobbed him off to [Condoleezza] Rice. Undeterred, Mandela called
former President Bush Sr, and Bush Sr called his son the president to advise
him to take Mandela’s call. Mandela had no impact. He was so incensed he gave
an uncomfortable comment to the cameras: ‘President Bush doesn’t know how to
think,’ he said with visible anger.”

Nelson
Mandela was left fuming after being rebuffed by President George W Bush.
Photograph: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Mbeki’s
spokesman, Mukoni Ratshitanga, confirmed that Mbeki met Blair at Chequers to
advise against the war and the UK’s involvement in it. Blair disagreed, Ratshitanga
said, insisting that he would side with Bush.

“President
Mbeki informed the prime minister that the South African government was about
to send its own experts to assist and encourage the Iraqis to extend full
cooperation to the UN weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix,” Ratshitanga said. “He
urged the prime minister to await the report of the SA experts before making
any final commitment about going to war against Iraq.

“The
prime minister responded to this information and suggestion by telling President
Mbeki that the SA experts should operate knowing that relative to the
decision-making process about the then impending war, ‘it is two minutes to
midnight’.”

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Mbeki
also had a phone conversation with Bush in 2003 and tried to discourage him from
going to war, the spokesman said. “President Bush said he would rather not go
to war but needed a clear and convincing signal that the Iraqis did not have
WMDs to enable him to avoid the invasion of Iraq.

“President
Mbeki informed him about the report of the SA experts which by then had already
been sent to the UN secretary general, Dr Hans Blix and the UN security
council. He informed President Bush that the report of the SA experts said Iraq
had no WMDs. President Bush said he did not know about the report but would
obtain a copy from the US ambassador at the UN, New York.”

It is not
known whether Bush did obtain a copy of the report.

Mbeki
later contacted Blair to ask him to find out from the US president what would
constitute a “convincing signal” from Saddam, promising that he would contact
Saddam to persuade him to send such a signal, according to Ratshitanga.
“President Mbeki understood from his sources and was convinced that Prime
Minister Blair received his message as reported above, but did not convey it to
President Bush.”

Blair’s
office did not deny the meeting with Mbeki or the specifics of what was said. A
spokesperson said: “All such information, including that based on limited and
controlled access, would have been scrutinised and assessed by our intelligence
agencies. Other intelligence agencies agreed that Saddam had weapons, the
disagreement in the international community was what to do about it.

“We did
not brush anything aside but of course had to act on the information of our own
and other agencies. However, as we now know the outcome was that although he
had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people and others, the
programme did not exist in the way that was thought.”

In an interview last month, ahead of the release
of the Chilcot inquiry, the former prime minister apologised for the
intelligence he received being wrong, and for mistakes in planning, but said he
found it hard to apologise for removing Saddam.

Saturday, 16 January 2016

From Pol Pot to ISIS: "Anything that flies on everything that moves"

2 November 2014

by John Pilger
—
In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a "massive"
bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies
on everything that moves". As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war
against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the
orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for
Kissinger’s murderous honesty.
As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including
the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I
am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A
telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who
had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They,
too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.
According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000
poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics,
loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone
to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west’s ultimate demon could not
believe his luck.
The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural
Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning
to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of
carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A
former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and
they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and
half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That
was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."
A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000
Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as
the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger
began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the
Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.
ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush
and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000
people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had
done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and
sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common.
Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without
fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs
of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.
Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism.
Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot’s "jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided
by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed.
"Rebel" Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state
ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The
arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador,
Oliver Miles, wrote recently, "The [Cameron] government seems to be
following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from
the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in
particular our Middle East wars - had been a principal driver in the
recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here."
ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in
destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an
epic crime against humanity. WikiLeaks cables (see below) show that the
US has been tracking, and exploiting, the rise of ISIS since 2006, when
the organisation first appeared in Iraq as a direct result of the
Bush-Blair invasion. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the
mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite
undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in
distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our"
societies.
It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after
the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations
Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi
population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam
Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a
modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making
the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines,
common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers
carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with
Depleted Uranium.
Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in
London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children
against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The
children’s vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of
mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an
outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the
Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.
Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was
allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay
for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as
power and water. "Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von
Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of clean
water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford
treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have
a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I
have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is
unavoidable."
Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in
Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior
UN official, had also resigned. "I was instructed," Halliday said, "to
implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a
deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million
individuals, children and adults."
A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that
between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000
"excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV
reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United
Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We
think the price is worth it."
In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions,
Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection
committee, "[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire
population a means to live." When I interviewed Carne Ross three years
later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. "I feel ashamed," he
said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how
a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and
maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of
sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we’d freeze them out."
On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the
horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a
warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned
and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the
former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In
1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq
for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain
abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". In 2003,
Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of
transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed
the invasion as a "fringe issue".
Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and
other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will
further "the imperative of a political solution". Obama has the same in
mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and
drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash
the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in
Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia,
Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a
village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen
civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.
The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck
happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by
the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost
inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance
of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those
regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other
across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.
Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has
crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British
military, wants "boots on the ground" now. There is a vapid, almost
sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the
willing" - notably Australia’s aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they
prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the
blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing
and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one
potentially valuable ally, Syria. This is nothing new, as the following
leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:
"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a
special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and]
to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and
SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic]
incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a
necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will]
provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use...
capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment
tension."
That was written in 1957, though it could have been written
yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last
year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two
years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on
Syria was planned. "I am going to tell you something," he said in an
interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two years
before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British
officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in
Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They
even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if
I would like to participate... This operation goes way back. It was
prepared, preconceived and planned."
The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the
west - Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and a
member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf
medievalists to channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including those
now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition
for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a
major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most
ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.
A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this
imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine
negotiations with Syria should be seen as "morally questionable" (the
Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those
who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but
dangerous.
Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all
shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of
Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open
wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic
extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope.
Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world
around them.
More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia
unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never
recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With
impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just
been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning
review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that
remained stable for a quarter of a century". Tell that to the people of
Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of
his "statecraft". Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our
midst will the blood begin to dry.
Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
—READ a 2007 State Department cable published by WikiLeaks about the 2006 declaration of the "Islamic State of Iraq", the forerunner organisation of ISIS.READ two US Congressional Research Reports on the
emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq under the leadership of Abu Omar
al-Baghdadi (the predecessor of ISIS’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), following
the death of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in
2006. See here and here.READ a 2007 cable
showing Islamic State presence in Iraq during 2007, and how demographic
shifts in response to sectarian Shia-Sunni tensions, directly provoked
by the US invasion and installation of a Shia-dominated government, were
already playing into the hands of the group.VIEW113 Iraq War Logs documenting US forces encountering ISI in Iraq from 2007 onwards.BROWSEnearly 3,000 documents published by WikiLeaks which mention the Islamic State of Iraq.READ three US Congressional Research Report on the
history of the US-backed "Sons of Iraq" Sunni militias, formed to oppose
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The failure by the US-backed Shia
government to integrate the Sunni militias into the Iraq army later led
to many "Sons of Iraq" returning to the jihadi insurgency, swelling the
ranks of modern-day ISIS. See here, here and here.READ a 2009 cable on AQI/ISI in Mosul.READ in a 2010 State Department cable
how Syria’s head of intelligence Ali Mamlouk discussed with US
diplomats the migration of foreign "takfiri" fighters, such as the
Islamic State, into Syria from war-torn Iraq, and offered the US a
military and intelligence partnership to address them. Declining, the US
later lent support to jihadi groups as Syria’s "opposition" during the
Syrian civil war.READ a leaked 2010 STRATFOR email
containing a private intelligence product documenting the transition of
Islamic State leadership to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, after the killing of
former-ISI leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in 2010.

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

It was supposed to be a bit different, about the future not the past. His final State of the Union address was going to look forward, give Americans confidence in their own strengths to face the challenges of domestic and global change.But it did not sound too different from so many speeches he has delivered over the past several years.

But the main point is that though he invoked the
name of Martin Luther King, jr., he failed to do very much to uplift
African-Americans’ lives, improve living standards across the middle class, or
stop the triumph of Wall Street interests over "Main Street".

He bemoaned the
greater concentration of income and wealth at the top of the US social system
but failed to mention that it increased during his tenure and under his
leadership. In 2008 and 2012, he raised millions from Wall St banks for his
election campaigns, and appointed several such corporates to the Treasury to oversee
the bailout of the banks after the Great Crash – men such as Timothy Geithner
who had been head of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York – overseeing Wall St
banks etc… as they built up steam and collapsed in 2007-8. In The Audacity of Hope,
Obama wrote that as he spent more and more time with corporate donors during
2007-8, he began to see the world through their eyes and not through those of
ordinary people. And that “class” – Obama used that term in relation to
corporate executives etc – do not see anything wrong in amassing as much income
and wealth for themselves as possible and at the expense of US society. Cutting big government and taxes on the highest income groups, for that "class", is the principal purpose of government. Alongside bailing out banks that bring the financial system to its knees to the tune of trillions of dollars.

The complaints Obama makes, all reasonable, are ones about
which he did little or actually helped make worse – especially income and wealth
inequality. And that has had significant knock on effects on election
financing – with just 158 wealthy families contributing 50% of all election
funding in the primaries up to this point. The wealthy hold on political power
– especially among Republicans, but also over the Clinton campaign – leads
directly to the selection of the most conservative candidates who support tax
cuts for the rich, cuts in welfare and benefits for the elderly, and oppose gun
control.

Obama's address was a pretty shameless example of 'newspeak' - Orwell would have been proud.